The Global Marine Species Assessment is an ongoing project charged with compiling a global review of the extinction risk to all marine vertebrate, plant, and selected invertebrate species to be added to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. It is tasked with redressing the imbalance of assessed terrestrial species to marine in the hopes that this data will shed light on the current conservation efforts specifically within the Gulf of Mexico in response to both catastrophic and chronic events. This global assessment takes into account all aspects of each species including population sizes, geographical ranges, past, present, and future population fluctuations or declines, generation lengths, and many other factors to categorize each species’ individual extinction risk. By using these species-specific assessments, the extensive data that is collected is commonly used for conservation efforts from local to global levels, including the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Results/Conclusions
In 2015, we assessed 447 of the 975 nearshore marine bony fishes for the Gulf of Mexico. We are currently working to complete the assessment of the remaining species. The data are used to assess current threats to marine bony fishes in the Gulf; currently 20 species, or 4.5%, are under some form of threat based upon IUCN criteria. Threats include coastal development and reef degradation, lionfish predation, and for groupers and snappers, overexploitation. We have also developed maps to examine the overlap of current protected areas with all species either Near Threatened or Threatened. There are a number of regions, for example the northern Gulf Coast of Florida, with high numbers of species of concern with no formal protection. We will present the expanded results of the remaining on-going assessments to provide a full picture of conservation priorities for marine fish in the region. The results will be made available to regional conservation organizations and coastal zone management agencies to guide on-going recovery efforts.